Newfangled
by Grumio
Summary: "Do you hear yourself when you talk, or is your brain just constantly playing that theme song you wrote?" Dez frowns, "Which one?"
1. Chapter 1

Newfangled

Or,

 _Nosferatu & You: Why You Might Have More in Common with a Suave, Ageless, Alchemist Than You Think _

**Disclaimer:** I own nothing.

 **Rating:** T for talk of blood and gore.

 **Summary:** His life is over, sort of.


	2. The Awakening

**The Awakening**

(An Increasingly Pedantic Prologue)

 **Note: The following account is a True Story. It is not intended to reflect the experiences of all members of the undead, rather to highlight the specific struggles faced by certain members of the community. Any similarities to any persons (not) living or (un) dead is completely coincidental.**

i.

He is removed in a way he cannot describe.

Or no-he was definitely bitten by something during the night. Judging by the fact that he feels all clammy and looks significantly paler than normal and oh hey there are two perfectly circular bite marks on his neck that something is def a creature of the night.

Dez has so many questions. Why would vampires hunt in a place nicknamed 'The Sunshine State?' Are they native Floridians? If so, how long have they been here? Did they fight in the Civil War? Are they Brahms Stoker vampires who're gonna suck all the blood out of his body and make suitcases out of his skin, or are they Twilight vampires who're gonna smell him a lot and gaze soulfully into his eyes while telling him they aren't "good for him"? He tells himself that if this is a potential Buffy/Blade situation, that he's brave enough, strong enough, and has seen enough episodes of Angel to become the slayer Miami Beach deserves, if not the one it needs right now.

Why couldn't it have been aliens? He's prepared for aliens. Or zombies! The importance of establishing a clear, efficient exit strategy for the eminent zombie apocalypse cannot be emphasized enough. Hence the storage locker downtown, that Dez pays fifty bucks a month for and which presently contains: (4) sleeping bags, (4) flashlights, (1) Laptop, (1) Special Edition Zalians Blue-Ray boxset, (46) Ziploc bags of dehydrated fruit and (14) industrial sized crates of condensed milk.

Yes, living forever is going to be awesome. Of course he's excited about not having a reflection. And the possible bat transformations? Sign him up.

It's just…it's a lot of work, that's all.

He's gonna have to decide whether or not he's going to go full on creature of the night and hope he gets picked by the really cool vampire coven or be the lone blood-sucker who Stands Apart and fights his own kind with the help of a sassy, tough, mortal sidekick.

A sassy, tough, mortal sidekick who he trades one-liners with during epic battle sequences, who is, (he gradually discovers during the quiet moments of their journey) underneath their sassy and tough exterior- a really sweet person with a wealth of emotional intelligence and pretty eyes, and who, just seconds after the gory conclusion of the final battle, standing on a field of blood and various body parts, Dez realizes he loves with an intense, fiery passion rivaled only by his former bloodlust.

Going the OG vampire route means tracking down the creature who turns him and pledging his life in servitude which hi, exhausting. Also, what if they don't get along? What if vampire senior is a crotchety old dude who resents the fresh young upstart trying to shake up the establishment? (There has to be a vampire establishment right? Dez isn't going to dispute any billion year old vampire law but come on, if they refuse to move into at least like, the 20th century, he's not going to regret introducing some anarchy.) Plus, there's the whole coven thing, it might just be one big popularity contest and while he is ridiculously popular among humans he's not gonna have time to endear himself to every vampire individually. Ideally, he'd like to feel like the prettiest girl at prom, with every coven ready to fight each other for his membership.

Loner, Stand Apart-y, slayer Dez is probably gonna brood over his dead bros-both the fact that they are dead and that he kills them-which could mean days, even years of standing on remote cliffs staring into space w/srs face, wondering if there was any way he could've prevented all of this bloodshed. (There is not) But, if that whole sassy, mortal, sidekick subplot works out there's a good chance he'll get kissed.

It's a difficult decision future Dez will have to make very, very carefully.

ii.

Present Dez is a little busy worrying about blood.

Its color, it's consistency, whether or not he wants to chug it like chocolate milk. Again, so many questions: How long after being bitten do the cravings start? Will he want all the blood, or will he be partial to his own former blood type? Are vegetarian vampires a real thing, or is that just another lie Stephanie Meyer tells him? If they are legit can you suddenly become a vampire vegetarian or do you have to have been a vegetarian while you were mortal? When will his fangs grow in? Can he still see his regular dentist? Are curly fries gonna taste gross now? What SPF should his sunscreen be? Why didn't whoever turned him stick around long enough to answer any of these questions?

He's in the middle of purchasing a domain name for his new vampire advice website (newfangled) when he realizes he knows approximately nothing. Bella Lugosi movies, seven seasons of _Buffy_ , five seasons of _Angel_ , two and a half episodes of _True Blood_ before he gets freaked out and has to leave the room, and the _Blade Trilogy_ haven't prepared him for any of the practical aspects of vampire-hood. Can he fight off a blood thirsty hoard? Absolutely. Does he know how to drain the blood of a small woodland creature without getting anything gross on his shirt? Not so much.

Doing research is just…confusing? Information varies ridiculously by article, to the point where Dez often finds himself reading two contradictory statements successively (to save time, he opens four browsers at once and reads two articles simultaneously). Also, vampire history isn't well documented at all. _Stakes and Stalwarts_ (K &S, 650 pgs. Amazon used: $4.50) asserts that they cropped up sometime in the Victorian era, while _The Crimson Hour_ (LM, 2,384 pgs. Amazon new: $28.00) not only insists there were translucent caveman sucking the blood of their Saipan brethren, but claims they were using what blood they didn't drink as a paint substitute. The library would be helpful if it didn't have so many books, and if those books didn't have so many pages, and if those pages didn't have quite so many long, ridiculous, words like oscillate and exsanguination.

(Cruising the Fantasy section of the Miami Beach main branch is actually kind of cool until he realizes he's can't start an elaborate study\information-gathering montage without the appropriate soundtrack. The startling lack of intense, "brave ginger discovers secrets while scrolling through google news" music on his phone means he has no choice but to spend a couple of hours constructing a vampire research playlist.)

There are people accused of being vampires, people who claim to be vampires, people who are madly in love with vampires, and people who aren't vampires but are still really into blood as a beverage. Attila the Hun? Dude drank the blood of his enemies out of their craniums, which is probably the rudest thing Dez reads all day, and makes him feel savagely glad that Mulan kicks his creepy, bearded, butt-like face in front of a good percentage of China. (Although, given recent events he might have to change his position on that. Is it ever politically correct to side with your oppressors in very specific instances?)

 _101 Vampire Facts_ is a big yellow volume of offensive stereotypes, with some pretty pictures of gothic castles. (Should he get a castle? Do vampires have to pay for stuff with human money, or is there an undead equivalent?) _The Rise and Fall of Shtriga_ is less useful vampire information, more graphic depictions of mid evil bloodletting. _Sanguine_ contains zero pieces of factual information, and is in fact a vampire romance novel, which Dez does not discover until he's five chapters in and far too emotionally invested in whether Ravana will marry Sabine and renounce her thirst for violence, or risk life-long imprisonment in the Halls of Perpetual Sorrow for avenging the deaths of her parents. (Spoiler alert: he cries at the end.)

According to _Nosferatu & You: Why You Might Have More in Common With A Suave, Ageless, Alchemist Than You Think_ there is a vampire living inside of him but it's strictly metaphorical, and by "releasing his inner Nos'" he can finally go after that big promotion at work, ask out the cute girl he's afraid to talk to, and move about the world with confidence.

Sites like Vampyre Society and Fang Bros range from stupidly long walls of text about the endogenous retrovirus, to MU students holding blood raves and a dude desperately trying to sell a slightly used Cherrywood coffin, he takes a mid-morning nap on page forty-seven of Time's Vampires Through the Ages, and the Coffin Lyfe message boards are filled with people who love vampires, people who are really mad about not being vampires, actual vampires and people who just really, really hate other people. Out of like, four billion articles there are countless lists of symptoms\warning signs but apparently, it's too hard to make one measly little 'transformation timeline' so people can know when to officially stop eating garlic pizza and start bathing in sunblock.

It's after four by the time Dez finally finds some straight answers. True, this mostly involves ripping the only copy of _Gigi The Vampire Bat_ out of the grubby hands of an overtly aggressive eight-year-old, but instead of accepting his self-defense narrative (that kid totally swings first) the three librarians on duty decide their time would be much better spent chasing him around the children's section wielding rulers, blowing their whistles, and totally ignoring the hypocrisy of their actions in a place dedicated to silence. Hiding under the puppet show theater in the pre k room is worth it though; yeah they kind of gloss over her origin story, but there's tons of good stuff about eating right, and the importance of friendship, and Gigi is a super sympathetic heroine.

iii.

Despite his myriad accomplishments:

a) Making an amazing playlist,

b) Gaining a deeper insight into his "condition,"

an air of 'frowny face pancakes' wafts over him on the bus ride home. Maybe it's the rain. Maybe it's that he's missed three out of his four afternoon snack times. Maybe it's the fact that he is eventually caught by those Dementor-y librarians and subsequently is no longer allowed within fifty feet of the Miami Main Branch. To distract him, Dez's brain spends from 38th street to Alva Blvd. outlining a host of new ideas: He's thinking a mentorship program, so that the newly undead have someone to walk (Fly? Jump impressively?) through the early stages of their vampire-hood with. He's thinking a vampire meet up app so all the Miami nightwalkers can hang out and talk about their experiences. He's thinking immortals film club, vampire recipe-trading society, all undead dungeons and dragons.

He's thinking a special horde of old school, Dracula types hired specifically to help newbies through their weird vampire puberty. Wait, that sounds gross-through their "official change of life".

Dez scratches his neck. Also, he still has lots of questions. Blood blanks: do they work like actual banks only the money is blood? Will he somehow feel more compelled to wear a cape than he does now? Will his "official change of life" be sudden, or does he have the weekend to figure out how to avoid large bodies of water while living in Florida?

He looks at the elderly woman sitting across from him, tries to determine whether any part of him wants to drain the blood from her body. She doesn't look particularly delicious. She just looks like someone's nana.

(In actual fact, she bares an incredible resemblance to his nana.)

But that'll change right? Pretty soon people are gonna start looking like walking slices of pineapple pizza. Talking bags of Hawaiian Punch-delivering his mail, handing him his change at Smoothie World, impersonating cops on Crime and Judgement. 'Blood-Bag' Americans, the majority of which he will actively have to resist the urge to snack on.

Dez leans his head against the window.

Something small and terrible bubbles up in his brain, uninvited: what about his friends? Austin loves scary movies, but has yet to get through one on account of how scary they are. (The Zalians franchise does not count, his best friend has always been good with sci-fi\horror) They usually end up screaming in an extremely masculine way\throwing the PS3 controller at the television\running in different directions insisting that they aren't scared, and after like, five minutes Dez puts in _The Notebook_. He turns the lights out because Austin once refers to Noah and Allie's love as "too real" and it's really important for him to pretend it doesn't make him cry.

He's a great secret keeper, (to this day no one knows about that thing with the frog in fourth grade) and well, if he found out things from scary movies were really real; he might be a little freaked out. Maybe.

Ally's not a huge fan of blood, and if anyone, anywhere, mentions Twilight she'll rant for ages about how stupid it is (something about Edward being gross? Honestly, Ally rants are just noise) but that doesn't necessarily make her anti-vampire. And yeah, "the shy songwriter who is secretly a slayer stalking her second best friend's first best friend" would be an interesting twist, but Dez has seen her try to throw tissues in a trashcan from like, two feet away and nothing about Ally's aim suggests she's plunging steaks into people's hearts on a regular basis.

And Trish? Well-

The bus lurches onto a side street, bumping his head against the window and stirring Not Nana Wade from her deep, old people slumber. As if she's just scrolled through an archive of his thoughts re: bloodsucking, the old woman produces a glare so 18th Century Angry Villager, that Dez ducks down in his seat on the off chance that fire comes shooting out of her eyeballs.

(Having read four whole paragraphs about the raw power inherent in undead psychic connections that morning, he figures the sudden, aching sensation in his chest is definitely the phantom pain of his ancient brethren being stabbed to death.)

A\N: Next time on 'Newfangled': Actual dialogue! Shorter chapters! The embryonic stages of a plot!


End file.
